Electrical switchgear, including switchboards and motor control centers, use conductors known as “buses” to connect circuit breakers and other protection equipment to loads. Existing conductors include one or more flat conductors depending upon the desired current rating or ampacity of the distribution equipment. As the length of these conductors increases, the power loss dissipated across the conductors increases and the temperature of the surrounding air increases due to natural convection, resulting in poor thermal dissipation and higher temperatures in the switchgear current distribution. In the case of flat conductors, to counteract the adverse thermal effects, multiple flat conductors are stacked together, but at the cost of an increase in the amount of expensive copper. For example, one well known bus system uses four laminated conductors for each phases of a three-phase system, and each laminated conductor has two conductors, for a total of eight conductors per phase.
Because of increased conductor volume, laminated flat conductors exhibit relatively poor current distribution due to the “skin effect” phenomenon, which holds that the current density near the surface of the conductor is greater than at its core. Moreover, in multi-phase systems, adjacent conductors of different phases are subjected to another phenomenon called the “proximity effect,” which relates to how current flowing through one phase interferes with current flowing through an adjacent phase. As a result of the proximity effect, current in a conductor tends to crowd towards or away from the side closest to a conductor of an adjacent phase, depending on the current direction in each of the conductors. As a result, some portions of conductors of one phase experience uneven current distribution within the conductors composing a conducting phase.